Using 3D design software SketchUp and in-video picture, director Julia Mullen captures the hyperbolic maximalism of confessional storytime content as she recounts the time she had an abortion party at age 20. Self-consciously topical, the story is recounted with extraneous details and self-deprecating asides. Mullen’s film becomes a hilarious send-up of self-cannibalizing the personal for content, challenging high-brow criticism in favour of parody and camp.

Amanda Kramer creates a perverse send-up to objectification, aging and the beige-fication of our world in a dark but hilarious film about a woman who swaps bodies with a chair, and becomes the very literal embodiment of objectification. Her body fixed into chair-form inspires obsession and possessiveness; her humanity, it seems, was nothing more than an obstacle in a world that values smooth, frictionless surfaces. Kramer’s hyperstylized and alienating form captures the joys and pitfalls of this condition, particularly as it ties with the identity and invisibility women face as they age.

Mexico City, Christmas 1997. Seen through the grainy lens of a home camcorder, the warm nostalgia of family video slowly unravels in Racornelia Ezell’s portrait of collapsing domestic bliss. Intimate, uncomfortable, and confessional, MACDO peels back the layers of an outwardly idealized household to expose the embedded violence of the social, cultural, and economic roles each family member is expected to inhabit. The camera itself becomes both passive witness and active participant, adding another layer of performance to an already tense, politically fraught environment by shaping the atmosphere as much as it records it.